Aphelion

So long as there are recognizable differences from the copyrighted work, you MIGHT get away with it. I suspect that prominent place names in popular works would be trademarks, but (to use your example) Tattooine itself was probably 'inspired' by Arrakis (Dune), with the giant snake skeleton a nod to the sandworms of Arrakis. Ain't no copyright or trademark on the IDEA of a planet with very little surface water -- Mars, itself, would qualify, if rigged to generate atmosphere faster than it could dissipate into space (due to the half-gee gravity). But have a Tusken raider or Jawa show up, even under a different name, and you would get into sued-for-plagiarism territory. Have your characters running around with laser swords (my theory is that they are actually shaped magnetic fields holding superhot plasma... the alternative being that they are 'laser beams', but reflected back and forth within (again) a magnetic or other force field so the blade behaves somewhat as if it is solid) and you will face the Revenge of the LucasFilm (a horrible fate involving a weeks-long concert by the Ewoks with Jar Jar Binks as backup dancer).

Desert planet? Fine. Sandworms or Sandpeople? Not so fine. "Moisture vaporators" / "Moisture farming"? Asking for trouble.

This is my opinion, not to be considered as expert legal advice (i.e., if you do what I said and still get sued, I wasn't there, it wasn't me, and Jim got me drunk before he asked the question, so I plead diminished capacity (which, considering the pre-drinking starting point, would be like no capacity at all).

So much has already been done that it's getting harder all the time NOT to repeat a theme . . . just rename the questionable items as best you can.

There are some things you might get away with. For instance, the term "blaster" has been used by so MANY writers that it's pretty much public property by now. Some concepts, like the sandworm that
Robert mentioned, have been borrowed and passed around, but you should still be careful what you call them -- and maybe, how you describe them, too.

I suspect that if you go the traditional publication route, your agent or editor will flag anything that might be troublesome.

I take it you don't want to go the fan-fic route and just write new adventures for familiar and established franchises. There's still a market for some of that, but I don't personally have a taste for much of it.

Mr. Rudnick,

I just got done reading the prologue and first chapter of your novel . . . lots of action, and it does seem like you've got something going there. I liked the tactical maneuvers in the battle scene.

Got to clean up the technical end, though, mostly in the punctuation department. Most frequent error I noticed was the lack of quotation marks at the end of a quote -- that can get pretty confusing. Some places, you seemed to have dropped a word here or there as well.

Also, I noticed you used the term, "turbolift." I haven't looked, but that may be a copyrighted term belonging to the Star Trek franchise.

Be sure to go over it all again with your editor's hat on.